pictures of books in picture books

Category Archives: Self-reference

Before How To Train Your Dragon, Cressida Cowell wrote Little Bo Peep’s Library Book (Hodder, 1999).

All the pull-out books in our secondhand copy have been pulled out, unfortunately. In the pictures, Bo Peep finds the book she needs at the library on how to find sheep. On the cover, though, she’s very clearly reading her own story – but whether before or after it happens, we can’t tell.

A sweet collection of ‘singing and dancing games’: Oranges and Lemons, compiled by Karen King and illustrated by Ian Beck (Oxford University Press, 2006). The elephant and the teddybear are holding an earlier cover than my reprint.

Usman loves reading his books in Usman’s Books by Julia Donaldson (Oxford University Press, 2006) … and just as we follow another of her creations, Charlie Cook, into his books, Usman wishes he could step inside a story. Spoiler: “And if you could step into this book…”, invites Usman, pointing at the cover, “you would meet me!”

A cat reading a bedtime story to another? This night-time scene is from Big Cat, Small Cat by Ami Rubinger (Abbeville, 2009). As you can tell from the cover in the picture, the original (Chatul Gadol, Chatul Katan) is in Hebrew.

Thanks to Ofra, who also told me about Itamar Meets A Rabbit (Itamar Pogesh Arnav) by David Grossman, which ends with a picture of Itamar having overcome his fear of rabbits to read his own story.

The Trouble With Dragons by Debi Gliori (Bloomsbury, 2008) is a fable about messy, careless dragons. Below, the little dragon is looking at a picture of dragons stranded on mountaintops as the weather changes: a picture the little human reading the book has just seen, six openings before.